New Life At the Roots

“Industrial agriculture is dead,” my friend Dan Nagengast tells me.
“But it's like a chicken with its head cut off, running around the
barnyard. It doesn't know it's dead yet.”

Dan is a farmer,
director of the Kansas Rural Center, and a shrewd observer of the
farming scene. So I'm inclined to believe him.

But it's tough
news to swallow. Big agriculture has been feeding us for decades. Many
of us grew up believing that with a few more miracle chemicals,
American-style agriculture would make deserts bloom all over the world.
It's hard to part with that notion.

But, as Dan points out, it's
high time we do. Big agriculture was unsustainable from the outset, and
the symptoms of its deterioration have become all too familiar:
polluted, depleted ground water; lifeless, eroded soils;
pesticide-resistant superbugs; endangered small farms and rural ghost
towns. If big agriculture isn't dead yet, its days are numbered.

But what now? How will we feed our 6-billion-member human family without big agriculture?

The
answer is unsettling: we don't exactly know yet. Genetic engineering?
Irradiated food? Some of the solutions are as frightening as the
problem.

But evidence is beginning to point toward a safer,
simpler path: getting small farmers back on the land and more people
directly involved in producing their food. Small and personal, it turns
out, is not only more beautiful than big, it's more efficient, equally
productive, more adaptable, more secure, and it contributes much more
to our communities, our economies, our health, and our lives.

The
only trouble with small, in a country focused on big, is that it's
often invisible. We see only the long shadow of big agriculture and
miss the generativity, inventiveness, adaptability of the agricultural
revolution going on at the local level, in farms, town halls, living
rooms, farmers' markets, city gardens.

Keeping “Farmer John” on the farmJohn
Petersen's story is a fable for our times. He was born on the Illinois
farm his parents took over during the Dust Bowl. At age nine, he was
milking and caring for the dairy herd twice a day. But by the mid-60s,
the scene was changing. Many of the farms that had dotted the
countryside around the Peterse place were either expanding or being
sold off. Given limited options, the Petersens chose to expand.

But
like many small farmers, they hit a financial wall during the ‘80s,
when land values dropped and loans dried up. Like 315,000 other farmers
that decade, John Petersen lost the farm – all but a few acres
surrounding the house.

In the years that followed, he wrote
short stories and plays, and grieved the loss of his farm. He also had
plenty of time to look critically at conventional farming methods, and
he didn't like what he saw. “The biggest drug party in the world is
taking place on today's conventional farms,” he says. “I hate drug
parties, because people (and vegetables) aren't themselves.”

But
he couldn't stay away from farming. In 1990 Petersen founded Angelic
Organics, a biointensive, community-supported farm. The members help
cover the farm's expenses and manage the cash flow by purchasing shares
of the harvest in advance. Then Petersen supplies packages of fresh
vegetables each week of the growing season.

Today the farm is a
thriving, bustling place, with interns and volunteers to coordinate, a
newsletter to publish, and email to answer – not to mention farming and
writing the “Farmer John” essays Petersen has become famous for.

There's more.

Last
year 20 members of Angelic Organics invested $180,000 to buy 38 acres
of land adjacent to the farm. They're leasing it back to Angelic
Organics for 15 years and will receive a little bit of interest (about
2 percent). When the lease is up, Petersen hopes that Angelic Organics
will be in a position to buy the land. In the meantime, the extra
acreage will allow him to rest some of the land, to raise salaries, to
roof buildings, to cut the debt.

Petersen was encouraged by this
unusual offer of help from off the farm. “I liked being reminded that
other people besides myself will put their money into investments where
the return is puny, just because it seems like the right thing to do.
It's easy for me to think that the world is not such a supportive
place, and here was evidence to the contrary.”

The moral of the
story: Farming is a three-way partnership. Now Petersen no longer
stands alone against the uncertainties of market, economy, technology,
bank policy, Illinois weather. The members of Angelic Organics are
eating better, investing their time and money closer to home, and
reconnecting to the land. And the land, the silent partner in every
human venture, is off its chemical life support and in vibrant health.

This is the new American agriculture.

An alliance is bornThe
idea that consumers and farmers could operate as partners, sharing
risks and benefits, was born in Japan, the brainchild of a Tokyo woman
who describes herself simply as a housewife. In 1965 she organized 200
housewives to buy milk in order to reduce the price. That action gave
rise to others and eventually to the new, personal relationship between
farmer and consumer known as teikei, food with the farmer's face on it.

These new partners soon realized that their alliance had the
power to humanize the market and drastically change the food system. It
gave rise to the Seikatsu Club, a consumer alliance that today serves
over 230,000 households and exercises its economic clout on the side of
sustainability by refusing to handle products that are detrimental to
the health of its members or the environment. And if members don't see
the product they want on the market, they contract with a farmer to
produce it. The Club's political clout is impressive. It has managed to
get more than 100 members elected to various municipal offices.

Next
the farmer-consumer partnership migrated to Europe, where it was
transformed into new configurations. But it took nearly 20 years for
the idea to reach the United States.

Partnering up, American-styleIn
1983, when Robyn Van En bought the Indian Line Farm in South Egremont,
Massachusetts, she was looking for a way to create an economically
viable organic farm. She consulted neighbors and friends and learned of
a new arrangement between farmer and consumer operating in Switzerland.
Van En decided to experiment with the idea. That spring she sold shares
in her apple harvest to cover her expenses. In the fall she delivered
bushels of apples to shareholders.

Her experiment, it turned
out, was both successful and historic. Not only had she brought a new
kind of farming to American soil, she had coined the name that would
stick: community supported agriculture (CSA). Indian Line Farm became
the first CSA farm in North America, where today there are more than
1,000.

As it approaches its 17th birthday, Indian Line Farm is going strong. But that hasn't always been the case.

When
Van En died suddenly in 1997, her son couldn't afford to keep the farm.
It was nearly sold, its probable fate a housing development. But again
the farm pioneered new conceptual territory. Together the E.F.
Schuhmacher Society, a community land trust, the local branch of The
Nature Conservancy, and the young farmers who had worked the land for
two seasons, drafted a unique arrangement. The farmers own the
buildings and lease the land. The land is held in trust as farmland,
conservation restrictions protect the wetland, and the fruits and
vegetables keep coming.

In its most basic form, as Van En
conceived it, CSA is an effective direct marketing mechanism. Farmers
receive a guaranteed income up front and are freed from the chore of
marketing during the growing season, when their talents are most needed
in the fields. They earn a better price for their produce by selling
direct to the consumer. And they get occasional help with the labor
from members.

What about consumers – what do they get out of the deal? They get well fed, and they get heard.

Labels tell the sustainability story“Now
more than ever,” my friend Dan observes, “those who wield the fork can
have control over what is on the plate.” He's right. Consumers who buy
directly from farmers through CSAs or other direct-marketing
arrangements do control how their food is produced.

But for the
vast majority of consumers – those who shop through the supermarket
middleman – the problem is more complicated. In order to control what's
on their plates, they must first figure out where their food comes from
and how it was produced. That task is much more difficult than it
sounds.

Theoretically, the market is driven by consumer demand.
We “vote” with our money, so the food we find on the grocery store
shelves is, theoretically, exactly what we want. No wonder we are
surprised and confused to find that in reality, the market is often
deaf to consumers' desires. Dan points out the irony: “In a country
that prides itself on consumer sovereignty, commercial agriculture has
had a remarkable run focusing on the wishes and needs of input
suppliers and agribusiness marketers while ignoring and even
suppressing the desires of those who eat.”

How can consumers
vote with their money when so little information is available on how
the food was produced? Or when labeling laws actually prevent producers
from including information that consumers want on product labels?

Solving
that problem is one of the two main goals of The Food Alliance(TFA), a
Portland, Oregon, nonprofit organization run by Deborah Kane. Its other
goal is putting a face on faceless farmers.

To accomplish these
goals, The Food Alliance established and promotes a label, TFA
Approved. Farmers earn the right to put the TFA label on their produce
by undergoing a certification inspection and committing to sustainable
farming methods, fair labor practices, and ongoing improvement in both
areas.

TFA-sponsored studies confirm what other eco-labeling
projects across the US have observed: most consumers – 73 percent –
will look for products that say they are environmentally friendly, and
most farmers long to be recognized for their good practices.

Does
our sustainable eating future lie in picking the proliferating
eco-labels off our tomatoes? Kane laughs. “I say the more small, local
labels the better!” But to address the proliferation problem, and the
decrease in significance that accompanies it, TFA is partnering with
local groups to share expenses and expertise.

The wave of the
future in consumer information may be more high-tech than labels,
though. The TFA is investigating a computer system that Kane saw on a
visit to Denmark. Consumers scan a package of meat or produce in the
store and see an on-screen portrait of the farm where it was produced,
the farmer who grew it, and a description of the farming methods.

From CSA to ASC If
we thought of community supported agriculture as a nifty
direct-marketing tool for small farms, we'd be correct. But we'd be
missing a bigger picture: it's also a tool of democratic
transformation. Community supported agriculture remakes towns into what
Van En calls Agriculture-Supported Communities. These are places where
consumers know what it means to care for soil, to plant and grow a fat,
red tomato.

Places where everyone is invited to sit down at the
dinner table, not just folks with plenty of money. Communities such as
these, where people are firmly connected to each other and to the land,
are fertile ground for growing new, locally designed solutions to the
problems all communities face: crime, conflict, hunger, alienation,
environmental degradation.

Pollyannaville?

Perhaps. But evidence abounds of a transformation already in progress.

Nine
out of ten US consumers are concerned about food safety. A third are
worried enough to buy organic (to the tune of $6 billion per year), and
another 54 percent would if they could afford it. As a result, there
are now 6,600 certified organic farms in the US and 2,000 farmers'
markets, each with its own local flavor and specialties. A vigorous
urban gardening movement has taken root, getting droves of city people
– old people, school kids, troubled kids, inmates, parents – outside,
dirt under their nails, growing good food, swapping tips and recipes,
making community. These are people who care, not only about their food
and those who produce it, but about whether their neighbors have enough
to eat. Countless groups, from CSAs themselves to nonprofit
organizations such as New York City's Just Food, are working to make
fresh, wholesome food accessible to everyone, through loans, food stamp
programs, and work scholarships. From Virginia toWashington state,
communities have reintroduced the Old-Testament tradition of gleaning,
where people who need food are invited onto farms to gather the crop
that remains in the field after harvest – up to 25 percent of the
harvest – which would otherwise go to waste. There's lots more evidence
where this came from, plenty of new life at the roots.

Even so,
I'm thinking Dan may not have gotten that chicken thing quite right
after all. It seems to me that agribusiness is more like a dinosaur at
the end of the Jurassic period. Big, cocky, self-assured, oblivious to
the smaller, more resilient life forms in the grass below – and to the
asteroid hurtling toward it.

Carol Estes is the associate editor of YES!

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